Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism

Abstract

Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism Alvin K. Wong (bio) In March 2022, in the midst of a fifth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong that generated more than 10,000 new cases per day, two colleagues invited me to take a short weekend trip to Tai O, a fishing village located on the western side of Lantau Island. At first, I was not very excited about the trip: I had already been to Tai O several times, and in recent years the fishing village has been overtaken by tourists. It's just another village that is commodified for its traditional and exotic appeal, I thought. My colleagues soon proved me wrong by taking us on a hiking trail that overlooks the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. While pleasantly rejuvenated by the breathtaking view, I was also struck by how regionally integrated Hong Kong is with the rest of mainland China within the spatial imaginary of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. After the hike, we decided to take a rest at a local café. Our server was a talkative, middle-aged, sporty-looking woman who gave off queer vibes. Once she found out that one colleague was from Taiwan, she shared her own experiences of working in Taipei and how much she missed Taiwan. On our way out, I spotted a postcard of Anson Lo and Edan Lui, the protagonists of the latest hit Boys' Love (BL) television series Ossan's Love (ViuTV, 2021), which is adapted from the highly successful 2018 Japanese BL television drama of the same name. As we passed by the Tai O Heritage Hotel, another lesbian butch-femme couple passed us by. I half-jokingly told my friends, "Tai O is becoming a gay Mecca of Hong Kong!" I recount my trip to Tai O to focus three ideas that might not appear related to one another at first glance: queer media, the Sinophone, and [End Page 159] regionalism. What kind of regional imaginary comes into view when we name Tai O as the new gay Mecca of Hong Kong? How does the critical framework of queer regionalism disrupt the conventional narrative of Hong Kong as a capitalist Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC)? To tackle these questions, I deploy queer Sinophone media as a critical concept that tracks the circulation and mediation of queerness within both Sinitic-language communities in the Sinophone worlds and across regional connections in Asia. In recent years, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have revived the concept of regionalism for different ends. Prasenjit Duara perceptively distinguishes several historical formations of regionalism, including the imperial regionalism of the British Empire in the nineteenth century; anti-imperial regional blocs of the early twentieth century among advocates of Asianism; economic regionalism and securitization via entities such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); and, finally, the economic polarity of regional migration resulting in the large flow of both professional expats and underpaid workers to the capitalist cities of Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.1 While Duara mentions that "there is increased sojourning by women employed as domestic workers, nurses, entertainers, and prostitutes," issues of women and feminism seem like an afterthought to his theorization of regionalism.2 If dominant frameworks of Asian regionalism marginalize women, sexuality, and queerness, recent work in transnational queer studies offers some promising directions. For instance, queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath has coined the term queer regional imaginary to demonstrate "the possibility of tracing lines of connection and commonality, a kind of South–South relationality, between seemingly discrete regional spaces that in fact bypass the nation."3 Expanding on Gopinath's theory of queer regionalism through Sinophone studies, which is defined as "the study of Sinitic-language cultures on the margins of geopolitical nation-states and their hegemonic productions," in this short essay I invoke the term queer Sinophone media to show how queer medial forms produced in Sinophone locations are inflected through regional formations.4 Specifically, I first examine how the Hong Kong media enterprise ViuTV's adaptation of the Japanese TV series Ossan zu Rabu (Ossan's Love, TV Asahi, 2018) gains popularity...